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Connecting the Dots
Girl, Groomed is a raw and unflinching memoir that traces your childhood experiences of grooming and abuse at a horse stable, and the long, painful process of understanding how that past shaped your adult life and relationships. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wanted to offer what I have learned personally and professionally about the importance of lining up with and healing from past trauma. I chose to use my own story to encourage readers that it is only through walking directly into the painful places that we can heal ourselves.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
The path towards reclaiming our lives is through an understanding of how trauma continues to impact ourselves and others. This shows up in many forms, but through an awareness of this, we gain the agency to decrease our reactivity and defensiveness that are constricting byproducts. This, in turn, gives us more choice and liberation over our lives going forward.
What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir, and what was the most rewarding?
Writing my memoir required me to delve back into memories that I had disconnected from. The process of re-experiencing what I had fractured off was both painful and healing. After all, we can only heal from what we can accurately name. Connecting the dots of my life helped me integrate and reclaim my story.
What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your story?
One takeaway is that trauma informs our lives, but it doesn’t define who we are or who we are becoming.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Instagram | Amazon
Raw and riveting, Girl, Groomed is seasoned psychotherapist Carol Odell’s evolving story of deepening her understanding of how the crisis she blindly imposes on her marriage is rooted in her own history of sexual abuse and violence at the hands of a predatory horse trainer who, for far too much of her young life, held all the reins. Chapters toggle back and forth between scenes of her childhood growing up jumping horses on the show circuit in Virginia and the therapy sessions she later undergoes as an adult sitting in “the other chair.”
Using her own journey, Carol demonstrates in this insightful memoir how unintegrated trauma limits us and our connection with others—and how the work of uncovering and reintegrating “what we do with what happens to us” can become the very source of our liberation.
Girl, Groomed
Carol Odell’s Girl, Groomed is a raw and unflinching memoir that traces her childhood experiences of grooming and abuse at a horse stable, the deep love she had for horses, and the long, painful process of understanding how that past shaped her adult life and relationships. Odell moves between her girlhood innocence, where horses offered her comfort and belonging, and the unsettling reality of how her trust was exploited. As she grows into adulthood, she reckons with the trauma, explores how it bled into her marriage and identity, and shows how therapy, reflection, and courage helped her reframe her story.
The writing is vivid, sometimes almost cinematic, and the way Odell describes both the beauty of horses and the darkness of abuse made me feel pulled in two directions at once. There were moments where I found myself smiling at her descriptions of childhood wonder, then seconds later reeling from the cruelty and manipulation woven into those same memories. I admired her honesty, but I also found myself feeling frustrated on her behalf, angry at how easily her vulnerability was taken advantage of, and heartbroken that the safe space she longed for was the same place that hurt her.
What impressed me most was how Odell refuses to simplify her story. She doesn’t paint herself as a perfect victim. She shows her younger self caught in admiration for her abuser, which was difficult to read but also profoundly true. That honesty made the book feel even more important because it illustrates the messy, confusing ways trauma imprints on us. I appreciated the way she linked her past to her marriage struggles later in life, and I found myself pausing often to reflect on how our old, unexamined wounds shape the way we love, fight, and cope.
I would recommend this book to readers who want a deeply personal exploration of trauma and survival, but also to anyone interested in the psychology of how abuse and grooming take root. It’s not an easy read, but it’s an essential one. I think therapists, survivors, and anyone willing to confront hard truths will find it valuable. It left me unsettled and hopeful at the same time, which to me is the mark of a powerful memoir.
Pages: 222 | ASIN : B0D96PPVDQ
LITERARY TITAN 